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Snyder: The Translation Alters My Message

The translator Margareta Eklöf added a passage to the historian Timothy Snyder's newly published book "About Freedom". Now Snyder responds to her criticism.

» Published: 20 January 2025

Snyder: The Translation Alters My Message
Photo: Stina Stjernkvist/SvD/TT

A passage in the book was added, which was not there from the beginning, about how the Nazis viewed the German people, something that SVT's "Cultural News" first reported on.

Now Snyder is commenting on the translation. In an email to SVT, he writes that it is "technically incorrect", but that it has also radically altered his message.

The history professor believes, among other things, that since the translator arbitrarily translated the term "team" to "body", the translator's point becomes the opposite of what he himself meant, and that the addition makes a discussion about the Holocaust impossible to understand.

Eklöf, born 1930, is well-reputed but demanded, due to the manuscript's "poor quality", that Albert Bonniers publishing house allow her to do the translation under a pseudonym.

She says that the problem lies in that Snyder, who has been praised for earlier books about, for example, Vladimir Putin's path to power, has been given such an elevated status that his American publisher did not dare to intervene when his reasoning became too unclear, something Snyder denies.

Albert Bonniers publishing house will now go through the book again to ensure that the Swedish version is correct.

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By TTThis article has been altered and translated by Sweden Herald

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